This is Africa

Throughout the trip, when glitches have emerged -- the bus lights go out in the middle of a dirt road, or water stops flowing through the tap, or we step over goat horns in the middle of city sidewalks – invariably someone will say to us “this is Africa!”  It’s one part sheepish apology, one part admonishment that things aren’t different just because we’re here, and one part comic relief.  We’ve heard a “this is Africa” refrain in each country we’ve been in, and the abbreviation “TIA” was popular enough to appear in the movie Blood Diamond.   It’s a phrase that tries to explain that the present, invariably challenging, situation typifies the African experience.  But on a massive continent -- with 54 nations (and one disputed territory), more than 900 million people, hundreds of ethnicities, and thousands of languages –how can one phrase explain it all?

On this trip, we have only seen 7 countries, crossed 4 borders overland, toured 20 major cities (of 20,000 or more inhabitants), slept in 60 different accommodations (with nightly rates between $15 to $65), ridden on 8 major bus lines, learned the words for “hello” and “thank you” in 12 languages, and purchased 5 different cell phone SIM cards. We cannot pretend to know more than a tip of the large African iceberg. However, each time we hear “this is Africa”, we are more convinced that the African continent is far, far more than what meets the eye at that particular moment.


Skyscrapers across Addis. Please note an awesome sunset.

To state the obvious, Africa is a complicated series of contrasts.  It is a modern Organization of African Unity skyscraper constructed at the edge of an over-crowded Addis slum.  It is home to children with stomachs bloated from a lack of protein, next to others well fed and cleanly dressed on their way to school. Women here give birth to healthy, beautiful boys (congrats, Sophie and Abdou!), and they also die unexpectedly in childbirth. This is Africa.

On Thursday, we were sitting 4 people across in the back seat of a brand-new SUV after a program site visit.  Piled in the car with us were the driver, the suit-clad Country Program Director, an expert in public health partnering with Tulane University, a program staff in Ray Ban glasses who shared a travelogue of his last trip to New York, and a representative from a partner organization completing a capacity assessment.  Squeezed in the trunk were three younger, part-time program staff. We were all going to the family home of woman killed the day before in a bus accident to offer our condolences to her brother, another program staff. The woman had arrived home to Addis from Dubai two weeks before to prepare for her upcoming wedding. She was visiting family for the holidays. Forty-two people were killed alongside of her when the driver sent an air-conditioned coach careening down an Ethiopian highway gorge.

Coca-Cola, Ethiopian Airlines, Timkat whites.

On the way home from the wake, when we merged into a honking swarm of blue and white taxi traffic, mixed with an urban goatherd, one of our fellow passengers looked up from his cell phone and said, “well, this is Africa.”  We wondered which part he meant.  A reference to 9 adults crammed into a 5 seat-belt car? The tragic funeral for a young woman who seemingly had her whole life in front of her? The concrete shell of a new skyscraper with a billboard advertising Johnny Walker? The need for 7 busy professionals to take time out of their day to pay customary respect to a junior colleague?



Last night, we ate dinner at a small hip restaurant near our guest house.  The place was packed.  The crowd was as fly as Brooklyn on a Friday night and Dakar on the celebration of Tabaski.  There were clusters of people sitting around 20 low, squat hardwood tables, each with a big metal plate covered with mounds of berbere-infused stews.  The very real famine of Somalia, just a few hundred kilometers away, seemed a remote notion in this restaurant where there was a constant stream of piping hot food coming from the kitchen. There was a table of handsome men in pinstripe hats, G-Star shirts and designer jeans.  There was a woman roasting coffee for a macchiato that would give any upscale coffee joint a lesson in java. There were women in gem-tone heels, painted nails and freshly permed curls.  As the food came, each one of us grabbed a piece of flat fermented injera, scooped up raw meat cut from the beef flank hanging at the front of the restaurant, and proceeded to eat it all with our hands.  This is Africa.

Several weeks ago, we read an article by Kenyan writer BinyavangaWainaina, called “How (Not) To Write About Africa.”  Calling on just about every stereotype of Africa, he rightfully and satirically criticized Western writers for using these hackneyed images so freely in their writing.  “Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls…Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked…Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’…Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla…And sunsets, the African sunset is a must.”



For us, Africa actually has been about sunsets and elephants and music.  And we’ve written about them. We have seen starving Africans.  And we have written about them, too. For us, Africa has been about eating goat from a dinged communal metal bowl on the dunes of the Sahara, as well as eating decadent black truffle oil pasta in white table cloth restaurants in a sleepy town near the Ivory Coast border. All things that we shouldn’t write about, either.



But to say (and write) "this is Africa" implies that one experience is more quintessentially African than another.  To Wainaina’s point, Africa is a patchwork of climates and cultures, in places overlapping and interwoven to create a common experience, and in others separated by large gaps without any shared thread.

Almost all people we’ve met, regardless of religion or nationality or age, want the opportunity for self-determination, protection for their families, and a little bit of joy at the end of a day, usually in the form of their favorite soccer team.  Whether cheering for the Ghanaian Black Stars or ribbing their brother for still cheering for Arsenal over Manchester United, the unification of a whole continent through mutual love of ‘football’ is a palpable sentiment. 



And, as easily as a love of soccer can bring people together, the difference of opinion around core values just as easily can separate them--  and the divergence itself thumbs its nose at the very notion that any one “this” is Africa.  For example, while many African columnists we’ve read have praised their governments for maintaining their “African values” and not succumbing to Western pressure to grant homosexuals the same human rights as heterosexuals, few (if any) have acknowledged that their South African brethren recognized same-sex marriages well before any Western governments. This is Africa.

Our wealth and American status has allowed us to participate in many things in West Africa and Ethiopia that are beyond the reach of millions of people on the continent.  The overwhelming majority of people we’ve met left school after primary education, lack potable drinking water, and are incredibly vulnerable to widespread famine and disease.  That poverty and lack of economic opportunity is very real, and by no means should one gloss over the global inequity at play here. To invoke “Africa” only when something has gone wrong not only misses the amazing parts of what is core to Africa, but it also misses the ordinary comings and goings that is part and parcel of each life on this planet.  It misses what connects all of us at our core. All of this is Africa.